Chirpy Chirpy Tweet Tweet: Analysing Twitter Analytics

If there is one thing we spend a lot of time doing here in office, it’s looking through the analytics of sites. Much like a gold miner in the river looking for that sweet sweet nugget, we’ll spend probably too much comparing every single bit of information given to us in order to find the best possible direction for a site to move in. That makes perfect sense of course.

But now one little birdy has been popping up in our emails this week and making our analytical brains start to perk up. Twitter analytics is showing up and telling us exactly how many people are really looking at our tweets. Once you get over the realisation that your tweet hasn’t reached the same millions that follow Barack Obama, Katy Perry and YouTube, the brief nuggets of information left for you to ponder over make for an interesting question

‘Do my twitter views (as in the number of visits) reflect what Analytics has been telling me?’

We compared the number of views on Twitter over the last week to the number of visits from Twitter in Google Analytics. We were told by Twitter Analytics this was our most popular tweet:

Pitching is strange, International Airline wants a one page proposal while a one product company wants a 30 page report #crazyworld

So we checked Google Analytics and seen that on that day roughly 10{262b22605905d7bdadc9d0423a4a46028d1c16e5c2069f052c9de36584b442a6} of the people who seen that tweet clicked through. Yes, a 10{262b22605905d7bdadc9d0423a4a46028d1c16e5c2069f052c9de36584b442a6} click through rate for just one little tweet. It was the first time we’d tweeted in roughly a month (very lazy on our part we know), but we wondered what the impact was like compared to a popular post we’d put on Facebook last month.

Now while we all look quite fetching in the photo, we wanted to look at the numbers behind it. Facebook told us that the photo had a total reach of 1,452 people, which is much higher than our daily average. So did traffic via Facebook to the site go up that day? Yes. Was it as high a percentage as Twitter? Nope.

Of the 1452 that viewed the photo, only 2 people came to the main site through Facebook. Now that is an incredibly low number, but then we realised that the site also seen 18 new visitors that day through organic search. If we assume that those people seen the photo and then just searched for us (we all know how difficult searching through Facebook can be), it brings in a total 20 new visitors from a social source. That still only accounts for a click through rate 0.01{262b22605905d7bdadc9d0423a4a46028d1c16e5c2069f052c9de36584b442a6} though and would lend to the theory that Facebook is itself is a self contained source.

Twitter might only be putting its foot in the water when it comes to providing users with analytics and clear cut numbers of how many people are viewing tweets, but if the click through rate trumps what Facebook provides, Twitter might just be one traffic channel that deserves a bit more attention.